A week of hacking the Java Language Server

As you may recall, Red Hat recently announced support for a common language server protocol. Furthermore, we demoed our initial implementation for a Java language server during the DevNation keynote. I posted an earlier blog covering these topics, and I would like to do an update in this post on the progress we’ve made since DevNation.

While preparing for DevNation, we had the idea that it would be a good feature boost if the engineering teams from Red Hat, Microsoft and CodeEny come together on a hackathon. Later, the participant list was extended to include engineers from IBM.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code team hosted the hackathon in their Zurich location. The collective engineering team, which is probably a recruiter’s dream of engineering talent, started working on issues around the Java language server.

I will not go into the details of individual issues worked on but as this is a true open source effort and you can check out the project yourself to find out about them. Instead, here is a screen cast of the hackathon release of the Java language server together with with Visual Studio Code. You can also download the VS Code extension (.vsix) and install and try the release yourself.

As a bonus, Java language server was also integrated to the Eclipse Orion project, demonstrating the effectiveness of a common protocol for providing language features on different editors.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to make progress and develop new web-IDE features and functionality!